Category: Books

Guns, Germs, and Steel 0

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Life is not always fair. If you travel in developing countries what we used to call the Third World it s hard not to wonder about the unequal divisions of our planet s wealth,...

The Mists of Avalon 0

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Camelot is forever, a myth that transcends centuries of storytelling, from Sir Thomas Malory’s 14th century classic, Le Morte d’Arthur, on through the ages, passed down to us in modern times in music and...

Raymond Chandler 0

Raymond Chandler, The Mystery Writer’s Mystery Writer

As a writer of mystery novels, I occasionally attend book conferences, events with names like “Bouchercon” and “Left Coast Crime” where big authors such as Sue Grafton and Elmore Leonard hold forth to auditoriums...

Anna Karenina 0

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

What’s the greatest novel ever written? This is a subjective matter, clearly: one man’s Proust is another’s Dostoevski, and the rest of the world can go to Dickens for all we care. For my...

Blood Work 0

Blood Work by Michael Connelly

Being a mystery writer – and someone who occasionally teaches mystery writing to wannabe authors – it’s usually a let down for me when I pick up a crime novel, too much like work....

Motherless Brooklyn 0

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

The critically-acclaimed young Brooklyn writer, Jonathan Lethem, has come up with some fairly original notions for novels. In As She Climbed Across the Table, for instance, a woman physicist falls in love with an...

Dracula 0

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Victorian England makes a fine study of hypocrisy, a veritable Petri dish of civilized manners that are greatly at odds with the reality lurking underneath. I like to imagine proper British tea parties, London...

The Vampire Lestat Book 0

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

Vampires can get awfully lonely, lurking in misty graveyards century after century. It’s not easy to be immortal, I suppose, watching empires rise and generations of man go, wondering what it all means. Frankly,...